There's One Problem with Starbucks' New Anti-Racism Campaign

Starbucks wants you
to know it cares about racial inequality. It cares so much that it's asking its "partners" — employees, to the layperson — to write the words "Race Together" in Sharpie™ on everything you buy to get you to talk about racial equality with your friends this week.

This is a good
thing. Honest dialogue is sorely missing from Americans' conversations about
race, and we all could use a reminder that we're not as "post-racial" as we'd
like to believe. There's just one problem — and that problem has a lot to do
with Starbucks itself.

Since at least 1997, Starbucks has played an instrumental role in the gentrification of America's cities. A recent survey of real estate database Zillow,
published at Quartz, confirms that homes within a quarter
mile of a new Starbucks location appreciated in value 31% faster than the average
American home between 1997 and 2014.

The report claims
this connection is causal. Housing near Starbucks appreciates less the further it
is from the store, while competing coffee sellers, like Dunkin' Donuts, do not see a similar impact on their surroundings. Critics have since pegged Starbucks as synonymous with rising home costs. If you see one popping up in your neighborhood, expect a bump in your rent to come with it.

Gentrification has been a hotly contested issue for decades.
It's a hard phenomenon to measure, but as Mic
has written, most agree that "its harbingers include the rapid influx of
young, well-to-do white people into once low-income neighborhoods." This demographic
shift comes with landscape shifts as well — more organic grocery stores,
yoga studios and, of course, coffee shops.

It also means poor and
working-class people get priced out of their homes and are forced to move
elsewhere. This often
occurs along racial lines. And people of color get the short end of the stick.

Consider this: Aside from Boston, which is 50% white, the seven fastest gentrifying cities in America have faced some of
their starkest home appreciation since 2000 in low-income neighborhoods of color. Racial segregation and discriminatory housing policies in the 20th
century mean a city's poorest areas are often those with the highest
concentration of racial minorities, making gentrification a de facto race issue
in most of these cases. People who can no longer afford the soaring rents are priced out, and entire local cultures and histories relocate or disappear.

This is no
accident. It's also no accident that those hit hardest by fast-appreciating
homes are those same, poor people of color.

But is Starbucks completely to blame? It's up for debate, the Guardiansays. Some of these housing prices appear to have been rising anyway — albeit not as quickly — while the closure of 600 Starbucks locations in mostly low-income neighborhoods in 2008 suggests the chain had trouble gentrifying neighborhoods single-handedly, especially during the Recession. Either way, the rise in home costs combined with the already pervasive perception of Starbucks as a major gentrifier speaks volumes. Its
presence definitely seems to fuel the phenomenon, and undeniably profits from it.

Which brings us
back to "Race Together." It's clear that not even Starbucks, a multibillion-dollar behemoth with 21,000 locations in 65 different countries, thinks it can solve America's race
problem with a full-page ad in the New
York Times and a hashtag. That was never the goal. According to company
spokesperson Linda Mills, the campaign was designed merely to promote dialogue,
share ideas and determine the company's role in addressing this issue moving
forward.

What this actually
means is unclear, even to the people at Starbucks.

"Right now,
we're just soliciting information and working on understanding the landscape
better," Mills told Mic, when asked
about the company's role in fueling gentrification. So far, CEO Howard Schultz
has hosted a number of town hall-style meetings in multiple cities — Oakland,
Los Angeles, St. Louis, New York City and Chicago — where employees have aired
their feelings and experiences around race in their daily lives.

But besides
that, a catchphrase on a coffee cup and a planned op-ed in partnership with USA Today (to be published this Friday),
"Race Together" has no concrete plans for addressing racial inequality. It's a
fair position, even a laudable first step considering most corporations'
silence around the subject. But as long as the company is negatively, even if unintentionally, impacting people of color, "Race Together" rings hollow.

To avoid becoming a superficial and hypocritical PR campaign
piggybacking on a hot-button political issue, Starbucks needs to address racial inequality in the cities it's helped gentrify. These communities are the clear place to start. And not just whether the company can do anything to alleviate gentrification's impact, but when, where and how it will do so.